a country where he could live by foraging--"We can live
on jack rabbits next winter," homesteaders would say. But Ida Mary and I
would have to depend on someone to get them for us. We realized more
every day how unequipped we were for plains life, lacking the sturdy
health of most frontier women, both of us unusually small and slight.
Back of Ida Mary's round youthful face and steady eyes, however, there
were grit and stamina and cool-headed common sense. She would never
stampede with the herd. And for all my fragility, I had the will to hang
on.

Well, we would eat corncakes with bacon grease a while longer. (They
were really good. I became an expert in making them.) And we still had
some bacon left, and the corn; a little syrup in the pail would take the
place of sugar. Uncle Sam hadn't won that bet yet, on the Ammons
homestead, though most of the settlers thought he would.

Three or four miles from the claim was McClure, a ranch house combined
with a general store and a post office. Walking there one day for
groceries and our mail we passed a group of men lounging in front of the
old log ranch house. "Now such as that won't ever be any good to the
country," one of them said of us. "What the country needs is people with
guts. There ought to be a law against women filing on government
land...."

"And against all these city folks coming out here just to get a deed and
then leaving the country," added another. "If they ain't going to
improve the land they oughtn't to have it."

"Most of 'em take their trunks along when they go to town to prove up,"
put in the stage driver, "and that's the last you ever see of 'em.
They've gone on the next train out."

Landgrabbers, the native westerners called the settlers, no good to the
country. And there was a great deal of truth in it. We began to check up
on the homesteaders of whom we knew. Probably two-thirds of them would
go back home as soon as they proved up, leaving their shack at the mercy
of the wind, and the prairie to wait as it had always waited for a
conquering hand.

Huey Dunn and the Cooks and the Wickershams were dirt farmers, come to
stay. Some of the homesteaders would come back in the summertime,
putting out a little patch of garden and a few rows of corn each season.
But for the most part there would be no record of these transient guests
of the prairie but abandoned shacks. Those who took up claims only as an
investment either sold the land for whatever pr